Thursday, November 11, 2010

At the last day of the HBS course there are two cases about organizational scale ups. The first case was about an international nonprofit organization, which has the strongest similarity to WMF from all the cases. Organizational changes often mean a lot of stress inside of the organization.

Shortly after the Foundation was established the first chapters were created. In the following time both the Foundation, the chapters and other formal and informal groups grew up in a more or less organic way. In the past time we are more and more confronted with questions like: Who has which roles? Whom can we expect for what? Who has which duty?

Because our structures are so grassroot and so organical created, it poses some difficulty now to sort all these questions out. This is the reason why the board initiated the Movement Roles workgroup. It is a very important workgroup and its work will have influence on the organisation of the Foundation, the chapters and other friendly or informal groups. Because of this it is very very important, both for the Foundation, as well as the groups that would be potentially affected, to take part in this process, make their suggestions and work together.

At the end of the four days I would say that the course was a good investment for the Foundation. Even though the cases seem to be far distant from our own situation at the first glance, I inevitably discovers again and again similar situations and principles. We got some framework on how to analyse situations systematically, but more of that is that we got excercises in a lot of situations which can face a nonprofit organization in how to concentrate on the most important part of the board work: remain calm, always keep the mission in mind, and communicate.

The course was very intensive. Everyday we studied three to four cases. Every case had a discription of about in average 30 pages. The day started at 7:30 with groupwork on the cases of the day and ends at about 17:00. But that doesn't mean the end of day. On the receptions afterward and on dinner table discussion would go on and on. After I closed my door in the dorm and started my recapitulation about the next days course.

Although the days were very tough, I never felt sleepy in the classrooms because it was so interesting, so challenging and so engaging. I only noticed how tired I got went at the end of the day I shut off the light and fall almost instantly into sleep.

Preparation is important for the course. Who go to the course without studied the cases beforehand would find himself lost quite soon. Because the cases are all quite complicated and long, one need to cross read them one day before again so that the details can come back into the memory.

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

One of the most discussed problem on the 4-day HBS course "Governing for Nonprofit Excellence", both on the course as well as off the course, is how to measure the impact of a strategy, an organization and how to measure the performance of an organization as well as its parts.

It is one of the most interested questions by almost all attendees. And it is also important for the WikiMedia Foundation.

Unfortunately, there is no easy answer to this question, not even from HBS.

The researchers at HBS consider the question in a very systematic way: At first, every organization has outputs. Outputs are things an organization can influence directly with its strategy and action. And they can be measured directly. In comparison to the outputs are outcomes. In HBS jargon outcomes are effects of an organization with their output. It is less in control of the organization, it is more a public effect. The sum of all outcomes are called impact by the HBS researchers.

For the WikiMedia Foundation, the number of articles is an obvious output. In issuing different policies we can (or can try to) influence this output. It is easy to measure. WikiMedia has a lot of such measurable values, like length of articles, article depth, visitor counts, etc. These are all what we often call metrics when we are discussing on our mailing-list or in the projects.

As everyone of us know, who had took part in these discussions, these metrics are no good measurements. The reason from them to be not good is that one can interpret them in a lot of ways. And they do not necessarily correlate with the outcome we wish.

The outcome we want to achieve is higher quality of our articles, more penetration of our projects, more participation of our users, more diversity of our projects, etc. And these are not so easy to measure.

Let's take the example of article quality. I know discussion about article quality since I joined our editing community. How can you design a measurement for so much articles in more than 270 languages in topics as different as top quark and Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva? The most obvious suggestion is article length. But the sole length of an article doesn't really reflect the quality of an article. An article could be very long, but still badly structured, poorly referenced and contains strong point of view. The article depth is a more sophisticated approach which treats a language version as a whole and tries to calculate how often the articles are updated. Beside technical and methodological problems there are also other difficulties in measuring quality. The perception for a good article and a bad article can differ between the editing community, the general public and experts of their fields. Each of these groups can have different criteria for quality of articles. For example the general public may value an article as higher quality because it is more comprehensible, but comprehensible may mean for an expert explanations that contain more ambivalent and misleading analogues.

Because of the difficulty of measurement of outcomes there is often a big gap between the measurable output of an organization and its impact. This problem is annoying for most of nonprofit organizations and highly uncomfortable for their boards. Nevertheless most of the organizations believe that they achieve impact with their work. The HBS researchers call this believe Theory of Change. It is a hypothetical and in many cases unproved theory about if we do this, than we will change the society in that way, and that would lead to the fulfillment of our mission. Most strategies of nonprofit organizations are based on theories of change.

So the theory of change of article length is that longer articles tend to contain more information, tend to be more thorough and thus of higher quality. The theory of change of article depth is that if more updates are done on a language version, then we can assume that the articles are more up-to-date, and more failures are corrected by the editing community, and thus better articles.

But as the many discussions in the past and current suggest these are all hypothetical theories and we don't really know.

The best way to proof the theory of change is to measure the outcome. As I had already written before, this is not easy. In many cases the organization also has no resource in know-how, man power and money to conduct a measurement or survey. The WikiMedia Foundation and our communities had in the past conducted a score of experiments and methods to measure the quality:

The featured article is doubtless the most successful of these. It is a measurement from the view of our editing community for high quality articles. Across all projects the threshold for featured articles are very high. With the public policy project WikiMedia Foundation began in the last months a test on user feed backs about quality from the reader perception. Although there were some outside evaluations with experts like those conducted by Nature or c't, these evaluations are often of too small a scale and not consistent enough to give us an overall trend over the years and across the language versions, or in more general fields.

So one of our major tasks in the coming years is still to find a way to bridge some gaps of theory of change. And one of the tasks of the board would be to engage our community and outside experts to free their resources and expertise to help us in this endeavor.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

In the four days while my stay in the Harvard Business School I often looked back at our vision, mission and strategy. The second day of the course concentrates on how vision and mission decide strategy. As Professor Leonhard put it, the question 0: What is we supposed to do.

Our vision is: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.

Our mission is: The mission of the WikiMedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.

And our overall strategy to fulfill that mission is: In coordination with a network of chapters and individual volunteers, the Foundation provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and other endeavors which serve this mission. The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the Internet free of charge, in perpetuity.

One of the most appalling think that we experienced in study the cases by HBS is that it shows how easily one lose his mission out of the sight and how difficult it often is to judge if a decision supports the mission. This seems especially easy in time of crisis. And that brings me back again and again to the most difficult discussions at the moment in our movement. The most difficult inside the board, between the board and the community, and inside the community: The controversial content discussion.

We have here two radical position that in my opinion reflects two aspects of our mission:

*The freedom of speech, the not censoring of project content according to whatever criteria as long as we move inside the frame of law reflects the aspect in our mission and vision, that we want to share the sum of ALL educational knowledge. And the sum of all knowledge certainly includes also those that are controversial.

*On the other hand, if part of the knowledge we are providing is so upset for part of the people around the world, so that they feel our projects as insulting and refuses to share their knowledge on our projects or share the knowledge that is collected on our projects, than we certainly failed to fulfill this aspect of our mission.

The call of boycott on the Aceh Wikipedia against the rest of our projects shows in a radical and confusing way how emotional and sometimes irrational this conflict even can evolve inside of our own community.

To me the duty of the board is to find out a way so that all aspects of our mission can be fulfilled, in engaged discussion with the community. Because it is a mission matter, it is a board issue, and because it is a mission matter, it is important. The lessons I learned by studying the cases is, it is all too easy to lost our mission, because of our personal view, because of the emotion that is involved in the discussion, because it relates to value and is a complicated topic. All this is for me even more reason to keep our mission in our mind when we are working through this topic. And again

Our vision is: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.

Our mission is: The mission of the WikiMedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.

While I was preparing for the course and reading through the cases my doubt and unease increased slowly. Would this be the right investment the Wikimedia Foundation is making? Would we and I as the current board chair really get any benefit from this course?

The cases are all very interesting, but they seem all so far away from us, I agree, a very unique organization. So what can I learn from a hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, searching for a merge partner?

A lot.

The story is about a non-profit organization, that had until now lived in a very comfortable zone, and that means,- serving the value it is supposed to provide,- has support from its community- has resources for its operation,and is now facing a changing environment which moves it out of this comfortable zone, erupting its support base. The story is about a board that recognized this danger and must make an uncomfortable decision and lead its organization to move on.

It strikes me how similar this sounds to us.

As a high-tech based organization, we are living in a fast changing world. A lot of things change around and inside of us:- almost all governments, western free ones as more restrictive ones, are changing their laissez faire politic to the Internet and imposing more rigid policies for the web.- the perception of the public on our projects, especially Wikipedia, is changing. We are no more that freaky Internet site five years ago, but one of the most important information source of the world. And that changes our responsibility to the public.- our content changed, comparing the most early version of the article Boston with its state of the art there is a tremendous difference. And that means we raised our bar for new participants tremendously. And that changes slowly the composition of our very own community. It changes how we work and how we debate.- the web technique changed in the past ten years since Wikipedia started. Its landscape changed dramatically during the ten years. Who is a veteran and had his own (first?) website on Geocities?

A lot of things that the Foundation and its board did in the last years has to do with these changes. The BLP resolution is a direct response to our changing responsibility to the general public as well as to the affected person. The usability project is a direct response to the changing technology. The change of our licensing model is also related to public perception and demand, because the pure GFDL is awesome for the use for printings. The strategic planning engages all the challenges we are facing. And the ongoing controversial content discussion is a result of our strategic planning (development and adaption in the nonwestern cultures) and the response of the changes in public policy and in our responsibility.

Non of these changes are uncontroversial and non of the discussions is unpainful. But if we want to fulfill our mission there is no other way as to move on.

What is interesting about the HBS course for me, is that by analyzing the cases I unavoidably come back again and again to our own situation. By looking at the others as an uninvolved observer it makes me more clearer to our own cases. And it provides me some guidance by providing frameworks or algorithms to analyze the situation more calmly and systematically.

In the recent issue of the magazine “Der Spiegel” is an article about the “backrooms” of Wikipedia. The article describes with the example of the debate about if the Donauturm in Vienna is a TV tower how uncivilized and desperate such battles are fought inside of Wikipedia community. The article used following phrases: “Wikipedia is not a project of many, but a project of few”, “Who hold the truth in Wikipedia is an important question”, “The sociologist Stegbauer came to the result in his study that the leadership of Wikipedia more and more closes the door and makes new comers more and more difficult to get in”, “There are a lot of debates on principles, for example about the question of notability”. It cites Henriette from WMDE: “Today you need three days to read all the rules. The bar for quality had raised, references are a must. A lot of topics are already occupied. There are notability criteria that decides about what one can write at all”, and it cites Elian, a de-wiki editor: “She don't like how people treat each other on Wikipedia” and “for users who search for information Wikipedia still works very well, but between the humans no more.” In respect of NPOV the author wrote: “In the reality most articles are written by a few main contributors who keep the articles as their own and defend any changes by other users.”

Last year within the Strategic Plan the Wikimedia Foundation conducted a “Former Contributors Survey”. Questionnaires are sent to 10,000 editors who had stopped their engagement on Wikipedia. 1428 sent their answer back and told us the reason of their depart. Beside difficulties with the technique of the software the second largest reason was deletion or revert of their edits.

The problem is not a German one, as one often thinks. It is a global problem, it is also a problem in the English Wikipedia or in Spanish or Chinese one. Not only are many topics occupied like Henriette said, but also positions and ideologies. The actual Wikipedia community is getting quite conservative.

It is sad because Wikipedia started as an innovation. One of its five pillars is “Be bold / Ignore all Rules”. I don't know why exactly this pillar was removed from the German Wikipedia and only listed in the “See also” section of the pillars.

Be Bold is not without reason one of the pillars of Wikipedia. It is the begin of Wikipedia. Nupedia became Wikipedia because Jimmy Wales was Bold to open the privilege of writing an encyclopedia to all people. Wikipedia is today so big because a user was Bold to write “Die Nordsee ist ein Mehr, ein teil der Atlant, zwischen Grossbritannien, Skandinavien und Friesland” (The North See is a see, part of the Atlant, between Greatbrittian, Scandinavia and Frisia), without references, footnote and check against notability criteria, with quite some spell errors for a single sentence, and because a lot of editors are Bold enough to follow him.

Is this pillar still up to date now? Yes it is. Especially in the light of declining number of new comers is it even more important. It urges every Wikipedian to respect the Boldness of the new comers and to give them helps and guides during their first bold steps in Wikipedia. It condemns every deed that pushs a new comer out of the project in their testing beginning. It urges every Wikipedian to check again and again if a rule is still up to date and apt correctly for the situation. It condemns every try to handle the rules as a holy book and to oppose every renewal. It is the begin of our project and is, like the other four pillars, the guarantee that our project remains healthy, that our community keeps its dynamic and growth.

Elian is totally right. Someone who is constantly aggressive against new comers or other community members is a vandal. He doesn't vandalize against the content of our projects, but he is vandalizing against the community. He is as devastating as someone who deteriorates the content of articles. Actually he is even worse. Vandalism against content can be reversed easily, but destroyed collaboration or injured feeling can only be repaired, if at all, slowly.

Quite exactly five years ago on the first Wikimania conference in the Haus der Jugend in Frankfurt am Main, Germany Jimmy Wales calls the community to strengthen its endeavor to improve the quality and reliability of Wikipedia. This was the begin of the development which leads to the rules that today an article must have references and footnotes. At that time we are often asked: How reliable is Wikipedia? During Wikimania ZDF broadcasted a report about Wikipedia, in which the chief editor of Brockhaus exactly raised this question. The question is up to date today like back at that time. And it does pose some conflict with the openness of the project.

This is a constant challenge for our community: To keep and improve the quality of Wikipedia and at the same time to open it for new members and for renewals.

A lot of rules related to quality in Wikipedia refers to one of the other pillars: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. In German Wikipedia for example the strongly battled notability criteria refers to the following sentence: “Only person and institutions that is important for an encyclopedia can have an article.” So the notability criteria results in the question, what is important enough for an encyclopedia. According to Wikipedia an encyclopedia is a type of reference work, a compendium holding information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge. But what is important enough to be counted as knowledge is quite subjective, there is no definition for it. For me as an IT specialist design patterns are surely very important, it is my daily tool. But for my boyfriend Kien, a gardener, it has no meaning at all. But he knows a few dozen of camellia and can often distinct them alone by their leaves. In German Wikipedia Brockhaus is often used as a reference when trying to answer the question if something is of value of human knowledge. Meanwhile Wikipedia exceeded Brockhaus in the count of articles, words, readers and editors by far. The fact, that the number of users on Wikipedia everyday is maybe more than Brockhaus in its entire history, that even my gardener boyfriend uses Wikipedia, is evident enough that the definition of knowledge for Wikipedia cannot be the same as for an encyclopedia which is mostly targeted to academics, libraries and rich buyers. Take Brockhaus as standard for definition of knowledge is definitively backward oriented. It is out dated and doesn't fit the scale of Wikipedia. It is an unnecessary limit set to the project that constraints the possibility of a community created online encyclopedia.

By the definition of encyclopedia one can also see that there is no THE truth, like Henriette said in her interview. There are different views and opinions. This is why NPOV is so important for Wikipedia. The purpose of Wikipedia is not to decide what is the truth. What is the truth is often beyond the horizon of a person, or even of the community. In Wikipedia we describe the being. If there are different opinions, then there is no one true and the others false. The is-status in this case is there are different opinions. A person who thinks he knows what the truth is and defends his self declared truth with vigor or even illegal methods like sock puppet or aggression or even insult against other community members is not a Wikipedian, but a fanatic and fundamentalist. He doesn't belong to the community, he has no understanding for NPOV and has nothing to do in Wikipedia.

Since there is no THE truth no one can own the truth, especially not in Wikipedia. What remains is respect: Respect for other person and respect for other opinions. This should be In Wikipedia, especially in its backrooms.

At first I want to thank the volunteers and friends from Wikimedia Macau and Wikimedia Hongkong for their organization, for their hard work. I know organizing such a meeting is not easy. A lot of unexpected things can happen, a lot of details and things must be done. Despite all these works a lot of people would be unhappy, would criticize the organizers or even suspect them. To keep on and make the meeting happen, make it a good meeting, is a very hard work. Because of this I want to express my very much thanks. Thank you very much for your work.

Wikipedia has five pillars. All our rules, all our work, should be based on these five pillars. All other rules can be changed or outdated, but these five pillars, we can say the constitution of Wikipedia, cannot be changed. I would like to ask if any of the friends here can tell me which five pillars they are?

The five pillars are: Encyclopedia, Neutral Point of View, Free Content, Respect To Each Other and Be Bold.

Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia, this is our first pillar, is the basis of our basis. This pillar defines the scope and goal of our work. But what is an encyclopedia? Which content belong to an encyclopedia, which not? When Wikipedia started no one of us could imaging that it would develop to what it is today. At that time we took the classic encyclopedia, like Britanica, as our example. Back at that time we thought that it would take eons to match the quality and quantity of Britanica. Back then people even listed out which articles Britanica has and we still not have. Today the number of our articles had exceeded by far Britanica. And the number of our users also exceeds by far of all users that had ever used Britanica. We have articles that Britanica doesn't have and would never have, like stations of the Hongkong Underground, or bus lines in Hongkong. Are these content of encyclopedia? According to the definition of classic encyclopedia obviously not. But our community, you, decided that they are. What does that mean? It means that we had expanded the definition of encyclopedia. We created a new definition of encyclopedia, which exceeds the content of the classic encyclopedia.

The second pillar of Wikipedia ist the Neutral Point of View. Wisdom is a human nature. The human being has no sharp claws, no sensitive nose, no wings to fly, no thick hide. But the to explore the world is the nature of the human being. The mankind can very effectively collect knowledge and pass it to their peer. We live in a complicated, multicultural and global world. When we learn, work or in our daily life we must make decisions and choices everyday. We can only make wise decisions if we can have the most thorough information. We need neutral knowledges to make decisions. 40 years ago the Red Guard brought China tremendous destruction. They did it not because they are evil, but because they don't have the knowledge, and the few knowledge that they have are filtered by other people. Because of this they are not able to evaluate the things they destroyed and they cannot evaluate the lives they destroyed. They are not able to select between right and wrong. Our goal is not to tell other people what is right and what is wrong. We don't have the ability and the right for that. If we begin to filter informations as good or bad, we are doing the same wrong thing like those people, who disguised the young people to do the destructions. Our goal is to provide thorough, neutral knowledge, so that our user can decide by themselves what is right and what is wrong. From Shan Hai Jing to the AIDS catastrophe in Henan, from Pythagoras to Harry Potter, in stories, history, literacy or now a day we can always meet people, who feels that some knowledge is too dangerous to be known by all the mankind, so that they must try to seal these knowledge to protect the society. But indeed the history had showed that no knowledge is always more peril than have knowledge, that filtered knowledge always do more harm than thorough transparent knowledge.

Only an open community can ensure that the knowledges we collected is neutral. Everyone of us has his own belief and his partial knowledge, no one knows everything. So the knowledge of a closed society is limited. Open has two meanings for us. Our community is open, and the knowledge we collected is also open. And that means that we have responsibility to our users. A lot of people don't understand why we take so many effort to respect the copyright of other people. We often hear people criticize us: In the Internet everyone copies everyone, why only Wikipedia don't allow this. There are a lot of good reasons why we respect copyright. The most important one is that we want to ensure that everyone can freely use the knowledge we collected. If we don't take care about copyright, our user would take risk if they use the content we collected. Other people can say: the content you collected is indeed not free. This would threat our mission, threat our reputation and threat the value of the knowledge we collected. Beside of this. Unfree knowledge is lightly not neutral, because its owner can decide who may use these knowledges and he can filter the knowledge.

Wiki is a social collaboration tool. When we are editing Wikipedia, we should never forget this. Social collaboration is another human nature. We have all the experience that gaming with friends makes more fun than gaming alone. The very basics of collaboration is mutual respect. Our community had devised deferent rules to encourage the collaboration inside of the community: We have barn stars, welcome template, Welcoming Committee, Contests. We have a lot of rules that are based on this pillar, like don't bite newbies, don't make personal insults, when discussing talk about fact, don't about person. Mutual respect is the glue of our community. Since the advent of Wikipedia a lot of new social content building and collaboration sites emerged, but none of them has such an open community, which is dedicated to a common goal like by Wikipedia. For an open community, which is collaborating to build up a project, the mutual respect of the community member between each other is the most important thing at all. Dear friends, if the discussion is tough, if we have to explain the same rules year after years, we get tired. But please let us never never never forget this most easily forgotten pillar.

Soon Wikipedia would be nine years old. Nine years is a long time on the net. Nine years ago most of the most visited sites didn't exist yet. Some of the sites that were very popular nine years ago are scarcely known today, or vanished. Nine years ago Wikipedia was an innovation. In these nine years we started with nothing and built up an extremely popular encyclopedia with increasing reputation. We defined encyclopedia new on the net, we introduced a new meaning of neutrality, our open collaboration is unchallenged by other sites. We have established a lot of rules to ensure the openness and collaboration on Wikipedia. But we cannot be content with this. We cannot stop with what was achieved. Our rules now are not unchangeable. If there are better means to encourage the collaboration inside of the community, to improve the growth of Wikipedia, we should be bold to discuss and adopt them, just as if Wikipedia is still in the time of its enfancy.

Ladies and Gentlemen, dear guests, friends. I am very happy and honored to meet you all today in Macau. I hope we can increase our friendship during the conference, can resolve our conflicts in the past, can discuss the future, develop new ideas and give new impulses to Wikipedia.